Many applications, systems and networks implement some form of timing synchronization. In general, time synchronization a way of arriving at a common time among a plurality of nodes. Various solutions have been proposed for synchronizing time among nodes in a system. For example, timing protocols that have been used in wireless networks include Reference Broadcast Synchronization (RBS), Timing-sync Protocol for Sensor Networks (TPSN), and Flooding Time Synchronization Protocol (FTSP).
None of these three protocols, however, can be used for timing synchronization applications in highly mobile mesh networks. RBS, for example, does not provide sufficient accuracy because it neglects the propagation time between nodes in the system. TPSN is not suited for dynamic networks because its protocols rely on having a known network topology. FTSP does not provide a unique master time to nodes in the network. Moreover, any protocol that uses a master node with a subgroup of slave nodes loses synchronization among the nodes if the master goes down or isn't reachable. In addition to being ill-suited for dynamic mesh networks, the above time synchronization methods cannot provide sub-nanosecond accuracy among the nodes. Thus, current time synchronization methods are lacking for many reasons.